Importing Sales Leads as companies

I am new to ACT premium 2007 when I came on board at this company as the system admin. I have become familiar with setup and so forth, but now that I am expected to lead training classes and support the sales team I have several questions I want to ask experienced people on the best methods to achieve results.

First question: Sales team provides a list of companies that they want to pursue for business, this list contains everything you need to contact this company except for a contact person.

what is the best way to import this list and assure that there will be a company record and an eventually contact record once communication with the company lends this information.

Second question: my attempts at company import has led to some confusion from text delimited the only option I can use apparently from the selection of ACT database, outlook, dbase, text delimited, goldmine

what selection will map the company name correctly as I have not been successful at this and have received results of imported company with garbage characters after it for the company name when completed the wizard.

Re: Importing Sales Leads as companies

Thank you so much for your answer you are definitely on the right track as I learned yesterday when I actually made a call to tech support on this issue. the results were this:

the column heading had a few spaces in it for company header...it looked like this C O M P A N Y

where the other headers were fine. when the spaces were removed the import wizard was able to provide a selection for company and the import went thru without a hitch. I was amazed to discovered that a simple fix could provide a field to map to that was not a selection previously. I wish that this product could just provide all the fields to map to regardless of the header information or any extra tab fields, etc as I had to clean up the entire delimited file to avoid import errors.

this has been a hard lesson to learn and thankfully my support call was a one time free warranty call but future calls will involved fees paid. so in conclusion I am grateful for people like yourself that have the time to help people like us. Thank you and may your day be blessed.

Re: Importing Sales Leads as companies

Sorry for the delay I had to fix my 9.0 lab to test this, I tested using Version 9.0.1.162 hotfix1. It works the same way as in V10 (ACT 2008)

In your text delimited file make sure you have column headers and the header for company name is "Company" without the quotes. Start the import wizard and select the source data as text delimited and navigate to your file (.txt or .csv), click next and choose company records, click next and choose tab for the delimiter (on a .txt file)and do not check import the first row option.

Click next and skip the predefined maps, in the company map screen Company will be matched to Company automatically. You will not see it in the drop down, map your remaining fields and finish the import.

Re: Importing Sales Leads as companies

Thank you so much for your answer you are definitely on the right track as I learned yesterday when I actually made a call to tech support on this issue. the results were this:

the column heading had a few spaces in it for company header...it looked like this C O M P A N Y

where the other headers were fine. when the spaces were removed the import wizard was able to provide a selection for company and the import went thru without a hitch. I was amazed to discovered that a simple fix could provide a field to map to that was not a selection previously. I wish that this product could just provide all the fields to map to regardless of the header information or any extra tab fields, etc as I had to clean up the entire delimited file to avoid import errors.

this has been a hard lesson to learn and thankfully my support call was a one time free warranty call but future calls will involved fees paid. so in conclusion I am grateful for people like yourself that have the time to help people like us. Thank you and may your day be blessed.